Tag: Chandra

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has detected a mysterious explosion in deep space and, although astronomers have some suspected causes for the incredibly powerful event, there’s a possibility that it could be something we’ve never witnessed before.

The signal is the deepest X-ray source ever recorded and it appears to be related to a galaxy located approximately 10.7 billion light-years away (it therefore happened 10.7 billion years ago, when the universe was only three billion years old). Over the course of only a few minutes in October 2014, this event produced a thousand times more energy than all the stars in its galaxy. Before that time, there were no X-rays originating from this location and there’s been nothing since.

The explosion occurred in a region of sky called the Chandra Deep Field-South (CDF-S) — the event was therefore designated “CDF-S XT1” — and archived observations of that part of the sky by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Spitzer space telescope revealed that it originated from within a faint, small galaxy.

“Ever since discovering this source, we’ve been struggling to understand its origin,” said Franz Bauer of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in Santiago, Chile, in a statement. “It’s like we have a jigsaw puzzle but we don’t have all of the pieces.”

One possibility is that we could be looking at the effects of a huge stellar explosion, known as a gamma-ray burst (GRB). GRBs are caused when a massive star implodes and blasts powerful gamma-rays as intense beams from its poles — think super-sized supernova on acid. They can also be caused by cataclysmic collisions between two neutron stars or a neutron star and black holes. Should one of those beams be directed at Earth, over 10.7 billion light-years of travel, the gamma-ray radiation would have dispersed and arrived here at a lower, X-ray energy, possibly explaining CDF-S XT1.

Alternatively, the signal may have been caused by the rapid destruction of a white dwarf star falling into a black hole. Alas, none of these explanations fully fit the observation and it could, actually, be a new phenomenon.

“We may have observed a completely new type of cataclysmic event,” said Kevin Schawinski, of ETH Zurich in Switzerland. “Whatever it is, a lot more observations are needed to work out what we’re seeing.”

So, in short, watch this space.

The research will be published in the June edition of the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and is available online.

The famous exoplanet was the first to be directly imaged by Hubble in 2008 but many mysteries surround its identity — so astronomers are testing the possibility that it might actually be an exotic neutron star.

Located 25 light-years from Earth, the bright star Fomalhaut is quite the celebrity. As part of a triple star system (its distant, yet gravitationally bound siblings are orange dwarf TW Piscis Austrini and M-type red dwarf LP 876-10) Fomalhaut is filled with an impressive field of debris, sharing a likeness with the Lord Of The Rings’ “Eye of Sauron.” And, in 2008, the eerie star system shot to fame as the host of the first ever directly-imaged exoplanet.

At the time, the Hubble Space Telescope spotted a mere speck in Fomalhaut’s “eye,” but in the years that followed the exoplanet was confirmed — it was a massive exoplanet approximately the size of Jupiter orbiting the star at a distance of around 100 AU (astronomical units, where 1 AU is the average distance the Earth orbits the sun). It was designated Fomalhaut b.

This was a big deal. Not only was it the first direct observation of a world orbiting another star, Hubble was the aging space telescope that found it. Although the exoplanet was confirmed in 2013 and the International Astronomical Union (IAU) officially named the exoplanet “Dagon” after a public vote in 2015, controversy surrounding the exoplanet was never far away, however.

Astronomers continue to pick at Fomalhaut’s mysteries and, in new research to be published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Fomalhaut b’s identity has been thrown into doubt yet again.

“It has been hypothesized to be a planet, however there are issues with the observed colors of the object that do not fit planetary models,” the researchers write. “An alternative hypothesis is that the object is a neutron star in the near fore- or background of Fomalhaut’s disk.” The research team is lead by Katja Poppenhaeger, of Queen’s University, Belfast, and a preprint of their paper (“A Test of the Neutron Star Hypothesis for Fomalhaut b”) can be found via arXiv.org.

Fomalhaut b was detected in visible and near-infrared wavelengths, but followup studies in other wavelengths revealed some peculiarities. For starters, the object is very bright in blue wavelengths, something that doesn’t quite fit with exoplanetary formation models. To account for this, theorists pointed to a possible planetary accretion disk like a system of rings. This may be the reason for the blue excess; the debris is reflecting more starlight than would be expected to be reflected by the planet alone. However, when other studies revealed the object is orbiting outside the star system’s orbital plane, this explanation wasn’t fully consistent with what astronomers were seeing.

Other explanations were put forward — could it be a small, warm world with lots of planetesimals surrounding it? Or is it just a clump of loosely-bound material and not a planet at all? — but none seem to quite fit the bill.

In this new research, Poppenhaeger’s team pondered the idea that Fomalhaut b might actually be a neutron star either in front or behind the Fomalhaut debris disk and, although their work hasn’t proven whether Fomalhaut b is an exoplanet or not, they’ve managed to put some limits on the neutron star hypothesis.

Neutron stars are the left-overs of massive stars that have run out of fuel and gone supernova. They are exotic objects that are extremely dense and small and, from our perspective, may produce emissions in visible and infrared wavelengths that resemble a planetary body. Cool and old neutron stars will even generate bluer light, which could explain the strange Fomalhaut b spectra.

Neutron stars also produce ultraviolet light and X-rays and, although it is hard to separate the UV light coming from the exoplanet and the UV light coming from the star, X-ray emissions should be resolvable.

Artist’s impression of a magnetar, an extreme example of a neutron star (ESO/L.Calçada)

So, using observations from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, the researchers looked at Fomalhaut b in soft X-rays and were able to put some pretty strong constraints on whether or not this object really could be a neutron star. As it turned out, Chandra didn’t detect X-rays (within its capabilities). This doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t a neutron star, it constrains what kind of neutron star it could be. Interestingly, it also reveals how far away this object could be.

Assuming it is a neutron star with a typical radius of 10 kilometers, and as no X-ray emissions within Chandra’s wavelength range were detected, this object would be a neutron star with a surface temperature cooler than 90,000 Kelvin — revealing that it is over 10 million years old. For this hypothesis to hold, the neutron star would actually lie behind the Fomalhaut system, around 44 light-years (13.5 parsecs) from Earth.

Further studies are obviously needed and, although the researchers point out that Fomalhaut b is still most likely an exoplanet with an extensive ring system (just with some strange and as-yet unexplained characteristics), it’s interesting to think that it could also be a neutron star that isn’t actually in the Fomalhaut system at all. In fact, it could be the closest neutron star to Earth, providing a wonderful opportunity for astronomical studies of these strange and exotic objects.

Take a good look, this is one of the most mysterious, massive objects ever discovered in the cosmos. We don’t really know what it is, but this thing is huge, spanning 55,000 light years across (the approximate radius of our Milky Way). What makes this all the more intriguing is the fact that this object formed only 800 million years after the Big Bang and it is 10 times more massive than the next biggest object observed in the early Universe. But what is it?Continue reading “Mystery Blob Detected 12.9 Billion Light Years Away”